Merchants, product manufacturers, retailers, advertisers, content providers, and other entities often try a wide variety of methods in order to get consumers to purchase more products or purchase products from a particular merchant or location. A common method that is used is to provide a consumer with an offer, coupon, discount, deal, etc., collectively referred to herein as “offers,” for a good or service. The desire is that the consumer will be motivated by the savings provided by the offer to satisfy any associated conditions and purchase the associated good or service. In an effort to improve the rate of redemption of offers, and thereby increase revenue for the associated merchants and manufacturers, offer distributors are often interested in ways to make offer acceptance and redemption more convenient to consumers.
Some such methods that have been developed include digital offers, where offer information may be stored on a mobile device and presented to a merchant at the point of sale, such as using a bar code or quick response (QR) code. Other methods include associating a payment card to an offer, such that when the payment card is used, the offer may be redeemed, sometimes automatically, by use of the associated payment card. However, current methods for associating an offer with a payment card for use in redemption thereof often include significant steps that must be performed by both the offer provider and the payment network or other entity associated with redemption of the offer. For example, an offer provider may develop an offer that is presented to a consumer and accepted. The offer provider must then collect the consumer's transaction account details, provide the account details and offer details to the payment network, and then the payment network must store the data associated with one another. Then, when the transaction is being processed, the payment network can process redemption of the offer accordingly.
Such methods can thereby be cumbersome for offer providers to develop, particularly for small businesses, such as small, local merchants, that may lack the resources necessary for development of offers, handling of sensitive financial information, and transmission thereof to payment networks, which may require specifically configured computing systems that can communicate using the payment rails and the associated communication protocols and standards. In addition, some consumers may be unwilling to provide their financial information to offer providers, and may therefore refrain from using current methods.
Thus, there is a need for a technical solution for linking transaction accounts to offers where a payment network and/or a computing system associated thereto may enable offer providers to register offers that may be presented to consumers for linking to transaction accounts. Such a system would enable offer providers to provide offers without modification to existing systems and expending resources, and would also enable consumers to link offers to their transaction account without providing financial information to the offer provider. In addition, the system itself may be improved as offer providers would not need to make modifications to existing systems or upgrade to new systems to add capabilities for new communications and protocols that are currently unused.